I'm curious where you're located. This was exactly my experience in "tech" startups in NYC, but not my experience at all working in SF. This is a big part of the reason why I have zero interest in leaving SF for some upcoming tech city, as in my experience you are correct there is a tendency to push engineers away from any business decisions, but much less so in SF which has a culture that ties engineering to entrepreneurship more closely. One explanation I've noticed is that the VCs in the Bay Area are far more likely to have technical backgrounds, whereas in NYC the VC firms almost always have finance backgrounds, and that culture bubbles down.